How to Build a Sustainable Developer Community: A 5-Phase Framework

Authors: Janeth Graziani & Jacob Lee

This post is the first part of a series where we'll be sharing our approach for engaging and growing a developer community. Throughout our journey at Autocode, we experimented with and refined various community engagement strategies, and we hope our insights will empower your team to scale your community in a sustainable way.

I joined Autocode as their first Developer Relations hire in March 2018 with the mission to evangelize the platform, nurture a nascent developer community and increase adoption of the platform and its tools. At the time, Jacob Lee was a technical co-founder and mostly responsible for that side of the platform, but a few years later the Autocode community hit an insane growth spurt, going from less than 1,000 Slack members to nearly 40,000 Discord members in the span of about a year and a half. As a result, he started spending more and more time building processes and coming up with techniques to help things scale.

Were proud to have been part of a small yet formidable team that successfully onboarded over 600,000 total developers onto Autocode's platform for building and hosting endpoints and APIs, and a key part of that was an incredibly supportive online developer community. In this first blog post, we will outline our five-phase approach to building this online community. We will subsequently publish a case study in a few days, detailing this strategy in action at Autocode.

Lets dive in!

Table of Contents:

• Setting Goals and Tone
• Phase 1: Identifying your Developer Audience
• Phase 2: Conducting In-Depth Research
• Phase 3: Crafting a Strategy
• Phase 4: Executing and Engaging
• Phase 5: Measuring and Iterating
• Sustainability and Beyond!

Setting Goals and Tone

No matter how large or small your company is, there are many, many benefits of building a vibrant developer community: reducing support and onboarding costs for new users, increasing adoption of your platform through referrals, retaining existing users, generating valuable feedback for your high-level product roadmaps, encouraging novel use-cases of your product, and more. Figuring out what you value most will help you better measure your results and prioritize initiatives effectively.

Setting the tone early for your community is similarly important. It will help give your community and its members an identity and will also help you make process-related decisions later on. For example, we made a conscious decision early on at Autocode to focus on being welcoming and letting all community members, no matter how inexperienced, feel heard. This led us to focus on keeping response times for support questions low, especially for new members. Then, as our community began to grow globally, this led us to prioritize empowering and training others who had learned from our example to help out during the times we werent available.

Phase 1: Identifying your Developer Audience

The first phase of this process involves identifying the specific group of developers you want to target. The developer community as a whole is huge- there are currently 28.7 million developers in the world, and that number is growing every day! It is therefore essential to pinpoint a specific group to allow you to focus your efforts initially.

You can choose a target developer community based on many different criteria, including region, tech stack, shared interests, or language. For companies with a live product, this group often starts with a self-selected group of users, but its still worth taking note of underlying similarities among your most passionate existing fans to see where your community can grow into. For example, at Autocode, though our product was quite generalized, we noticed immediately that many of our users were younger, first-time developers interested in building around Discord, and based much of our initial strategy around that.

Once you have successfully identified the audience you would like to focus on, you can move on to the second phase of the strategy.

Phase 2: Conducting In-Depth Research

The goal of this phase is to understand your developer audience's pain points, values, and interests, and the best way to do this is to be embedded in your target community. Find where they congregate and go in with genuine interest to understand what they value, what tools they use, and their developer pain points. Some examples of this include:

• Attending existing community events, conferences, meetups, and online webinars
• Identifying and talking with respected people within the existing community
• Pay particular attention to people excited about engaging with and helping others and their style! Get to know them by name
• Reading online forums and spaces where the community congregates like Reddit, Dev.to, Hackernews etc

We attended several meetups to engage with and gain a deeper understanding of the communities we were targeting at Autocode

Phase 3: Crafting a Strategy

Once you have in-depth understanding of your target developer audience you can use this expertise to help your team craft a strategy to engage and help the developers within that audience. Use what you learned about your audience's values, interests and pain points, and bear in mind your initial goals and ways that you can guide the community towards them. Some examples could include:

• Planning a content calendar covering topics that addresses the identified interests, pain points, and values
• Planning Meetups and events that will pique their interest
• Planning workshops that teach a valuable skill or tool that they can apply to their development workflows
• Planning incentives like custom swag or other special recognition that you can offer your most passionate champions

For this phase, you want to consider ways you can encourage potential members to take part in your community and give back to it. Providing them a place to meet, support, and network with like-minded individuals is a given, but offering learning opportunities, social clout, or material benefit can also be powerful.

Planning is important, but execution is everything and that leads us into our next phase of our strategy.

Phase 4: Execute and Engage

The ultimate goal of this stage is to build trust and genuine relationships within the community.

Execution involves:

• Sticking to the planned schedule for content publishing and delivering
• Setting firm dates and times for events and meetups and delivering
• Encouraging growth by guiding new community members from your events and content to your online platforms and integrating them in a welcoming way
• Sharing updates and roadmaps to keep the community excited and engaged
• Providing opportunities for competition and collaboration within the community
• Ensuring consistent staff presence to ensure community members feel heard
• Elevating and recognizing active and helpful community members to encourage a sense of pride in their efforts

By executing on your strategy and engaging with your audience you are building a strong foundation based on availability, consistency, and demonstrated value. You want your community members to feel proud to contribute to and be a part of your community (while being wary of elitism!), and therefore spontaneously encourage others to join. When done correctly, this creates a powerful feedback loop of growth!

At Autocode we hosted Maker.dev, meetups that brought together makers and developers to exchange tools and knowledge with each other

Phase 5: Measure and Iterate

Finally, it's necessary to measure the success of your hard work in relation to your initial goals and go back to Phase 3 to adjust your strategy as needed. Some metrics could include:

• Content: Traffic to site, social media engagement, downloads of projects
• Events: NPS (% of promoters - detractors) from surveys, special signup codes
• Online Community Growth: Measure the number of new community members coming from meetups, conferences and other engagements. Bespoke invite codes can be useful here!
• Product and tool adoption: Track the usage of your product or tool and identify trends that may suggest an initiative is working

It is vital to take stock and use metrics that map to your initial goals for your community in some way to inform your community engagement strategy. This will enable you to improve your approach over time. Remember that building a sustainable community takes effort, iteration, and consistency but with the right strategy and commitment to measurement and improvement you will always move towards building a sustainable community.

Sustainability and Beyond!

Sustainability is achieved when community members can take the lead in the initiatives your team has modeled. This can involve:

• Community members publishing tutorials, open-source code snippets, and apps
• Community members providing support and sharing resources
• Community members volunteering to become moderators

An Autocode community member sharing resources to help new members on Discord

Reaching this point is a huge milestone, and youll notice that your teams role will start to change. While the amount of direct involvement theyll have with day-to-day tasks like answering support questions will decrease, it is important not to distance yourself from the community and maintain a firm, consistent presence. Your team will take on more management-type duties where they actively look out for and spotlight quality community content, create guidelines for contribution, and keep an eye out for rising stars who can make up the next wave of champions.

However, dont let the fact that your community has a feedback loop going lull you to sleep: keep your foot on the pedal and continue to foster engagement and growth through your content calendar or other strategies that have led you this far!

Thank you!

We hope reading about our process helps you form strategies for building communities of your own! No two communities are exactly alike, but this general framework can help you stay organized and measure the success of whats working and what isnt. Well be following up next week with another article on what this process looked like at Autocode, so stay tuned. In the meantime if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter @janeth_graziani and @Hacubu. Thanks for reading!